Tag: language

It will not have escaped your attention that the Style Guide I introduced to the office has made it’s way into the national media. It is a statement of regrettable fact that I have received a great deal of mockery from so-called experts. Experts, soothsayers, astrologers are all in much the same category. Do you think that I consulted experts before moving my hedge fund to Dublin? Do you think that I consulted experts before ordering the renovations of my mother-in-law’s stately home? Of course not. As an Upper-class Englishman, I know that veritas ex intestinis. If you would believe the word of experts then you would believe that I have only the intelligence to achieve a second-class History degree, and that belief is simply intolerable. I shall expand gradus per gradus upon the reasons behind some of our new departmental rules.

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Yesterday, during the weekly Prime Ministers’ Question Time, Theresa May accused Jeremy Corbyn of ‘mansplaining’ to her about International Womens’ Day.
I think it’s a good way to illustrate a bugbear of mine – the loose interpretation of the word ‘mansplaining’.

There isn’t, as far as I can see, anything in Jeremy Corbyn’s question that’s patronising, or that implied that May didn’t know that it was #IWD2018. Corbyn merely mentioned the fact in order to highlight a moral flaw in Britain’s relationship with Saudi Arabia. Mansplaining, in its clearest form, is a confident but unqualified man asserting his opinions to a more qualified woman.

Semiotics, in brief, is the study of how we construct meaning. For example the phrase ‘green light’ has a meaning beyond a literal green light – it can be used metaphorically as giving permission to go ahead. Even if you’re not familiar with them, you won’t be surprised to learn that the Lorde song Green Light and the Ting Tings song Traffic Light are not about literal lights.

Ferdinand de Saussure wrote about the relationship between a ‘signifier’ and ‘signified’ – the sign and the thing it represents. So a nuclear waste sign is not dangerous itself, but signifies that radioactive material is inside a container, or nearby. Similarly a lit green light is associated with the abstract concept of going, and a red light with the abstract concept of stopping.

Semiotics can be confusing – I’ve studied it at university level and still find a lot of de Saussure and Roland Barthes mind-bending – but it’s a process that almost all of us have a basic understanding of on a subconscious level. We make sense of these signifiers on a daily basis without really thinking about it.